and the FIRA – Association of European Rugby championship. In 1975 Romania went for an 8 games tour to New Zealand, tour concluded in Wellington with a 10-10 draw against Junior All Blacks. Home nation sides began to award international caps for matches against Romania from 1981. Romania won rugby internationals over Scotland in 1984 and 1991, and also over Wales in 1983 and 1988 (the later in Cardiff). Between 1960 and 1990, Romania beat France eight times, the most famous being in 1990 when the legendary French based no. 8 Hari Dumitras led Romania to a 12-6 victory in Auch, France. Canadian second row Norm Hadley believed the 1991 Rugby World Cup game against Romania was more physically sapping than playing either France or New Zealand. The former All Blacks scrum half Chris Laidlaw, writing at the end of the 1970s, saw rugby as a positive force in East-West relations at the time: "Rugby has become the ping-pong of outdoor sports in its capacity to spread goodwill between East and West. Over the last 30 or 40 years it has spread through Eastern Europe, establishing itself strongly in Rumania and Yugoslavia, Hungary and into the USSR. The fact that a Russian team [sic] has finally played a full-scale, if unofficial Test match against speaks for itself." "Rugby tours between countries on either side of the Iron Curtain have generated considerable political interest among the governments concerned, and the results can be quite astonishing. The recent n tour of New Zealand, for instance, germinated other contacts between the two countries and was partly instrumental in the establishment of new trade agreements which otherwise might not have begun." Chris Laidlaw writing of the open secret of shamateurism in Soviet sport said: "So far as the East Europeans and the Russians are concerned, who knows where the incentives lie? In such societies rugby, like many other sports before it, is becoming an expression of national achievement and therefore the subject of careful nurturing. Yet, is the risk of the double standard, so evident in the athletic arena, permeating the East Europeans' approach to rugby so great as to justify the exclusion of the Communist world indefinitely from regular rugby competition?" "Much to everyone's surprise, Eastern Bloc countries are among the game's vigorous participants, seemingly oblivious to rugby's capitalist class-ridden origins. Russia emerged from behind the Iron Curtain and came under international scrutiny